GOP celebrates MLK Day by claiming him as one of their own

by: Eric B.

Mon Jan 16, 2012 at 14:13:28 PM EST

Count this among your annual gathering of conservatives claiming that Martin Luther King, Jr. was the original teabagger. It's a special e-mail from the state GOP chairman, Bobby Shostak.

Since our country was founded, we have always been a people who deeply cherished freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loved freedom so much that he constantly risked his life in its pursuit for others, no matter their station in life. Dr. King pushed our nation into the unflickering light of conscience so that all could enjoy equality before the law; and he gave his life so that all Americans would be born into a nation that fully lives the seminal words of its founding, “we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

Today, his legacy lives on in others -- all those who advance the cause of individual liberty, freedom and equality.

This is an awfully generous allowance for a people who so deeply love freedom that it required a war that left more than 600,000 dead just to get an emancipation that led to a further 150 years of lynchings, Jim Crowe, Lester Maddox and George Wallace and Orville Faubus, and violence threatened over attempts to end segregation under the auspices of a doctrine now held dear within the Republican Party ... state's rights.

What is further rich is that voter suppression under the guise of fighting largely non-existent voter fraud is a thinly scaled attempt to roll back the right to vote that was among those things King gave his life for. So, thanks, but no thanks guys. If you'd like to really honor MLK, then what say you stop making it more difficult for poor minorities to exercise the franchise.

Also, this. I have a very difficult time believing that the same Martin Luther King who advocated on behalf of labor unions and for some of the most radical wealth redistribution and housing desegregation laws would take too kindly to the state going to an urban center and dictating policy in a way that left workers earning a small paycheck at a time of such great wealth inequality. Again, if you really want to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. ...

When words cease to have meaning, Magic Frank edition

by: Eric B.

Sat Jan 14, 2012 at 12:03:30 PM EST

Well, we all knew it would happen ... on his way down the ladder of GOP presidential hopefuls, Newt Leroy Gingrich would wage a scorched earth campaign on Willard Mitt "Mittens" Romney. We knew this because that's what Gingrich is, a doughy mass of ego and spite who once shut down the federal government because he couldn't sit in the front of Air Force One. And, so he did, unleashing a vicious attack by way of the same sort of Super PAC that Romney used to torpedo Gingrich last month. It's the sort of video, if you haven't seen it, that you'd expect from a Michael Moore, a thorough knifing of the Republican frontrunner that will be difficult for Romney to pass off as looney leftist yelling.

Magic Frank, donning his hood as chief inquisitor of the modern Republican Party, sees something else at work. It's now, he writes, time to purge Gingrich from the Republican Party.

Conservatives believe the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to seek their own happiness and make the best of their own lives in a free country and economy.

Gingrich can no longer claim the latter definition.

If you're part of an ideologically-inflexible political party, nobody every tells you that they're going to purge you. It doesn't happen that way. There weren't arguments or curses like in the movies. Your political commissar comes with banal punditry.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Magic Frank has single handedly managed to redefine conservatism as what is mainstream to the Republican Party. Willard Romney, pro-choice and pro-gay rights before he was against them, is now the real standard bearer of conservatism. And, it is so not because Romney has had some sort of convincing pre-deathbed conversion to true conservatism, whatever the hell that is, but because he was the victim of an attack everyone could see coming six miles down the road. Conservatism, according to Magic Frank, apparently finds value and nobility in whatever helps alread-wealthy people become more so ... even if they have to destroy communities to do it.

To be fair to Magic Frank, capitalism today is under unprecedented attack. I mean, those stinking hippies in Zuccotti Park were bitching last fall that Wall Street had grifted the nation and that they wanted capitalism back. A more bone-chilling assault on free enterprise the nation hasn't seen (leastways, since the genuine movements to supplant capitalism with anarchy, socialism, and/or communism of the first half of the 20th century).

Wrap up on the short imprisonment of Monty Burns

by: Eric B.

Sat Jan 14, 2012 at 11:31:32 AM EST

Jeff Wattrick at MLive covered the short, tear-stained imprisonment of Monty Burns pretty authoritatively. Here, for instance, a wrap-up of the punditry. And, this one, breaking down the case and Burns' professed love of country after departing the stony lonesome.

The thing that's been missing in this sad tale of woe is that Burns not only failed to live up to court-ordered obligations, but this last year managed to stall the construction of a competing span by purchasing himself a chamber of the state Legislature ... specifically the state Senate ... and by convincing the state's teabagger set that in all this he's the real victim of oppressive government.

The two go together like hand and fitted glove, and someone somewhere ought devote some energy to pointing out that the Senate Republicans have as a chief patron a man who had to be jailed because he was found guilty of holding a legally binding order of a court in good standing in contempt.

The ongoing train wreck that is Janice Daniels

by: Eric B.

Sat Jan 14, 2012 at 11:05:30 AM EST

We can all be happy that Troy mayor Janice Daniels, having put her real estate license in escrow thanks to the backlash over her homophobic ravings (followed by her pronouncement that she's the real victim), apparently has no intention of letting go of her grip on #9 on the state's most odious political figures list.

But then this week, Daniels compounded her Facebook faux pas when she met with a group that advocates for gay students at Troy High School to help plan a forum on bullying and tolerance. The students say Daniels suggested including a panel of psychologists who can speak to the "mental disease" that homosexuality represents.

Daniels denied that, but acknowledged that she wanted to make sure the teens were made aware of the "higher incidence of disease" among homosexuals.

There's no point in laying out the explanation behind the "higher incidence of disease," is there? It's like pointing out that Detroit's decline and fall weren't linked solely to "liberal Democrat" policies but a complex stew of neglect and regional dysfunction. Once you grab hold of the end product and refuse to think things through to genesis, you're basically a lost cause.

Meanwhile...

Daniels has a right to her opinions, something she has pointed out several times since the initial flap over her Facebook post. Our First Amendment protects bigoted speech as much as any other kind, and no one has the right to silence another purely for the objectionable nature of what they're saying.

I would like to propose something here. I would like to propose that if Janice Daniels wishes to play part-time mayor of a major Michigan city that she be expected to wear her big-girl panties. The First Amendment protects bigoted speech from prior restraint by the government. It does not, however, protect bigoted speech from mockery and derision. Pretending that she's somehow a victim of her critics in all of this elevates hate speech to special status ... she has a right to embrace it to the point where anyone who responds is worse than she is.

Shocker: Merit pay doesn't lead to better schools

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 13, 2012 at 14:01:14 PM EST

From the department of "Who could have predicted?"

Paying teachers more won't attract them to high-needs school districts, especially if that extra pay in linked to student performance, according to a study released by groups backed by teachers unions.

More attractive to teachers, the report says, is smaller class sizes and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues, said Teri Battaglieri, executive director of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, which helped fund the study.

In other words, like all professionals, teachers aren't automatically drawn to pay but are drawn to things that make the career they've chosen to be professionally attractive. Does this surprise anyone that people who go into a service-oriented field rather than one predicated on making lots of money pick things that make their work more personally enriching rather than money? Again, if we had policy making decisions based on reality rather than the whims of people who believe the whole world really does operate according to the bottom line of a ledger, this wouldn't be necessary.

And, I've said it before, I'll say it again ... the key to improving schools has next to nothing to do with teacher pay. It has everything to do with making children want to learn and feel that it will benefit them. That means getting parents more involved. It also means being able to help a child make a connection between an education and how it will improve his or her lot. Cities allowed to resemble demilitarized zones sends the message that getting an education won't necessarily open up opportunities for a better life.

Coming to a wilderness area near you: ATVs

by: Eric B.

Fri Jan 13, 2012 at 11:43:54 AM EST

The Upper Peninsula has benefited like no other part of the state from the important work of past Congresses to place off limits from development a few shreds of land, mostly around unique natural features. Mining may have once defined the Upper Peninsula, but to most of us trolls it's now a recreation paradise. One of the most important laws that has helped promote this was the Wilderness Act of 1964, which was intended to identify the most unique of the nation's natural features and recognize that they have a value all their own that can't be quantified in a way that Babbitt nation can recognize -- intrinsic aesthetics. The crux of the law is that there are places in the United States which will, going forward, be untrammeled by permanent buildings or the roar of engines.

Dan Benishek, thankfully, has apparently recognized that this sort of thinking is outdated, and wants to open up the nation's wilderness areas to the sorts of ORVs and other pollution-spewing machines that have made the air in our most popular national parks so bad to breath. I give you the Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage Opportunities Act.

(1) The provision of opportunities for hunting, fishing and recreational shooting, and the conservation of fish and wildlife to provide sustainable use recreational opportunities on designated wilderness areas on Federal public lands shall constitute measures necessary to meet the minimum requirements for the administration of the wilderness area.

(2) The ‘within and supplemental to’ Wilderness purposes, as provided in Public Law 88-577, section 4(c), means that any requirements imposed by that Act shall be implemented only insofar as they facilitate or enhance the original or primary purpose or purposes for which the Federal public lands or Federal public land unit was established and do not materially interfere with or hinder such purpose or purposes.

The primary purpose of the Wilderness Act was to create "units of land" on which people could go without worry that they might have to have modern, mechanized society imposed upon them by some thoughtless asshole who, when he looks at nature, sees mostly just stuff he wants to drive across or animals to kill. The idea that you'd allow people to use ORVs to facilitate hunting in a wilderness area violates the very basic spirit of it. And, really, frankly, if you wanted to get all "heritage" about it, you'd require that people pack in supplies on mules and horses, since that's what they had to do before the internal combustion engine.

It might not strike the typical Michigander as a really big deal. After all, I doubt most people -- even those who claim to enjoy recreating outside -- understand the difference between a national park and a wilderness area. It's kind of insider baseball for the wilderness preservation movement. It's also the source of long-standing tensions, especially out West, where they have genuine concern to keep mechanized vehicles out of certain places because they can cause genuine damage to the ecosystem through clumsy use (cryptobiotic soil, we're looking in your general direction, sir). This is a white wash of that.

The Bridge follows up with reporting on student debt

by: Eric B.

Thu Jan 12, 2012 at 16:40:11 PM EST

But, rather than waiting on a government handout for food, he ought to get himself a job.

Michigan State University economist Charles Ballard said he knows a student buried in loan debt who is “working 40 hours a week as a night watchman. Naturally, he’s having trouble staying awake in class.”

This isn't at all an unusual story to hear if you know many college students. A lot of them have taken to going part-time and working a couple of part-time jobs. Some take time off in between semesters to work and save money so they only have to work part-time when they're in school. Or, as the article lays out, they simply take on crushing debt ... that follows them right into the start of their professional careers.

I read a pretty good article about that a few months ago, mind you. With bills that arrive as soon as the diploma ink is dry, those students aren't permitted the luxury of trying and failing before ultimately learning from mistakes and succeeding that is critical to entrepreneurship. So, what you have is a stagnation in the entrepreneurial spirit, except among the already wealthy who have no real incentive to succeed because they mostly already have the money they'll need to live. And, because they inherited their wealth -- and we're looking in your direction Willard -- and didn't earn it, there's no reason to believe that they've actually earned the capital that flows to them as you'd expect if we had a real, functioning meritocracy.

Whatever. Like benevolent overlord Rick Michigan says, the problem is that for too long we've simply been spending money on higher education. What we really need is the Legislature, and it's majority Republicans who are mostly hostile to education, to busy itself with the work of reinventing Michigan's university system. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Monty Burns to block the sun no more

by: Eric B.

Thu Jan 12, 2012 at 16:09:32 PM EST

In honor of this.

I am told, mostly by this article, that today that former Congressman Siljander was also sent to the slammer for aiding and abetting terrorist organizations, which is sorta strange since he campaigned on returning prayer to school.

Dear Bridge Magazine ... welcome aboard

by: Eric B.

Wed Jan 11, 2012 at 11:02:17 AM EST

One of the regular drums we beat here is the shift in cost burden for a higher education from the state as a whole to individual students. The problem with tight finances at universities aren't greedy professors who've taken too much (in fact, study after study shows that university professors, like employees with doctorate degrees in the more traditional public sector, earn considerably less than what they would if they were in the private), it's that the state over the years has reduced its support for the university system. That reduced support has forced universities, which still need to balance budgets, to shift costs to students ... not just in terms of tuition hikes, but in a myriad fees and hidden costs like expensive parking passes. This isn't something I made up, mind you, but that I got after interviewing CMU's interim president Kathy Wilbur, a former Engler administration official, when she took proposed tuition hikes to CMU's Board of Trustees.

Finally, someone else took it seriously enough to put numbers behind it.

Michigan families pay more to send their children to state universities than families in almost any other state, according to a Bridge Magazine analysis. Not coincidentally, Michigan also gives less money to its public universities than almost any other state.

The statistics in the article are sobering, but not surprising. As we've noted here before, they're also not something that popped up in the last two years. It's been the trend in elected state government to balance the budget not by investing state dollars in a more prosperous future but by cutting university appropriations and forcing universities to raise their own cash. They've also done it with municipal governments and shared revenue, forcing tax hikes through local millages and dodging accountability when citizens become angry not at Lansing for a record of continued broken promises but at local leaders who at the end of the day need to keep cops on the street. As to the university funding issue, Lessenberry calls it a fine way to destroy the future, a future that we're supposed to believe will be built on education and a knowledge-based economy.

This isn't isolated to just university appropriations issues, mind you. We've seen it play out twice, tangentially.

Before last year, the administration under Jennifer Granholm had a program to help defray these costs by extending federal food assistance to college students. One of the things that the Snyder did upon taking office -- through chief tormentor Maura Corrigan -- was to throw college students off federal food assistance (to no savings to the state). Corrigan told them to all get jobs like she had when she went to school and the state subsidized her education to the tune of about 75 percent.

And, it's playing out now at the University of Michigan, where research assitants are trying to organize. As we've noted here before, one of the ways universities have saved money is through hiring fewer tenured and tenure-track faculty and instead farming out that work to underpaid temporary faculty and graduate students.

Meanwhile, benevolent overlord Rick Michigan tells Wayne State students that he plans to continue being part of the problem, rather than the solution.

Snyder acknowledged that his first year in office was full of difficult choices. But the cuts are over, he said, and while the state may look to re-invest in education, it will do so in an intelligent way.

"(In the past) too much of government was simply about spending money," he said. "We will invest, but we're going to do it based on best practice and on accountability, transparency, metrics and measures.

"Every good engineer would support me on that one, to say if you're going to do something, you've got to have good quality measures to make sure you do it the right way."

Accountants have basically ruined everything, and that includes our university system. The last thing we need is for the governor to start picking and choosing which university programs to spend money on based on transparency and observable return on investment. This leads us down the path of damnation, where an education is wholly transformed from what it's supposed to be -- a broadening of the world -- to a money-making racket, and away from the incubators of truth that they were originally intended to be.

Peter Sinclair ... Climate and Sea Level: An Emerging Hockey Stick

by: Eric B.

Wed Jan 11, 2012 at 09:35:44 AM EST

I've said it before, I'll say it again ... Michigan is incredibly lucky that it is home to Peter Sinclair, the Midlander who is responsible for the globally-popular Climate Change Denial Crock of the Week series. That way, I have an easy hook into posting his videos on here, a blog about Michigan politics. His latest video represents a maturing of a communicator, from simply pulling apart the latest rancid awfulness of the denier set to pro-actively establishing where the latest science lays. It's always my first piece of free advice to budding science journalists to, when covering an issue involving science, not only find where there is controversy but where there is agreement.

Sinclair's latest video is a clinic in how to do that, establishing that there is agreement among scientists that sea levels are rising and that this rising is attributable to human-driven climate change, but that the uncertainty comes in knowing how much.

Gretchen Whitmer latest woman to be called a hooker by a Republican

by: Eric B.

Tue Jan 10, 2012 at 13:38:25 PM EST

This is just sad.

Former Michigan Republican Party (MRP) Executive Director Greg McNeilly tweeted Monday that Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D-East Lansing) is a "government hooker."

This is the latest chapter in the controversy over Sen. Rick Jones (R-Grand Ledge) comparing public relations executive Kelly Rossman-McKinney, founder of Truscott Rossman, to a hooker.

...

McNeilly then tweeted that afternoon, "Actually I do think Gretchen Whitmer is a government hooker . . . just to be clear."

Naturally, the brethren claim he's referring to a Lady Gaga song of the same name, which makes no sense if you read the song lyrics and an explanation of what the song is about. One also doubts that a former executive director of the state GOP is so up on his pop music that he'd be able to drop a Lady Gaga reference without some kind of coaching. Meanwhile...

4:58 p.m.: Faux-ingindation and hyperventilating to the tune of political correctness = juvile, pathetic, sad, small minded and silly. But it's 2012!

We must have different definitions of pathetic, this fellow and I. He finds outrage that for the second time in a week a prominent woman was referred to as a hooker by a prominent member of the state Republican Party; I find it pathetic that someone who runs a school choice program can't spell juvenile correctly when trying to insult the intelligence of other people.

Decision coming for Mad Jack on another run at Congress

by: Eric B.

Mon Jan 09, 2012 at 14:33:44 PM EST

Lordy, lordy.

"Jack (Hoogendyk) and Erin have spent countless hours in thought, evaluation and prayer, as well as seeking the advice of trusted friends," the e-mail reads.  "And now it is decision time."

This is what happens when you mistake your own inflated ego for the Word of God ... you believe that he commands you to run for Congress. The problem is that when you've jumped aboard this train, if you win you can always chalk up the things you do to the will of God.

Anyway, as we've noted here before, what's happening here is that Club for Growth is trying to buy themselves a second Michigan Congressional seat and Jack Hoogendyk appears happy to sell it to them. The question is whether the media in the district will do the heavy lifting of identifying that the race is really between two career politicians with the support of lots and lots of cash, and that Hoogendyk's comes courtesy the Citizens United wave and not some phony-baloney grassroots group. Fred Upton might be bringing old money to the mix, but at least no one's under any illusions where it comes from. Also, despite last year's flip-flop to maintain a chairmanship of the House energy committee, he's probably still a far cry better than anything we could expect from Jack Hoogendyk.

Bill Schuette continues to waste taxpayer dollars stifling self-determination

by: Eric B.

Mon Jan 09, 2012 at 11:48:00 AM EST

The lede paragraphs of an article in this morning's Freep.

More than 300 University of Michigan graduate student research assistants opposed to unionization are being frozen out of what essentially amounts to a rigged decision-making system, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said in a court filing.

Schuette asked the Michigan Court of Appeals on Friday to overturn a ruling by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission barring him and a group called Students Against GSRA Unionization from being involved in an upcoming administrative hearing on whether the 2,000-plus GSRAs at U-M can form an union.

Well, first off, let's talk numbers here. 300 students object; 1,700 (if we're being charitable and going with 2,000) are in favor. That's less than 20 percent of people actively opposed to a organizing process, and this is before anyone even takes a vote to ratify the union. And, again, this isn't 300 people who object to the results of a union election, this is 300 people who object to the vote taking place, presumably because it's pretty clear they'd lose.

And, again, at issue is a 1981 MERC ruling that found that research assistants are students, not employees, and can't organize. Much has changed since then, most acutely the amount of support state government gives the university system. Universities have responded by hiring fewer tenured faculty and handing off the work that still exists increasingly to temporary (adjunct) faculty and grad students. The workplace that existed in 1981 no longer exists.

And, finally, the article notes that the attorney general's office recognizes that it is arguing not just against a changing reality, but also the state constitution. The constitution intended to give the university system wide autonomy to prevent political meddling in its operations. How is it that the office of the attorney general is unwilling to follow not just the clear word but clear spirit of the primary document he's paid to uphold?

She left one unexplored, but that's understandable I suppose

by: Eric B.

Mon Jan 09, 2012 at 09:56:04 AM EST

Making the rounds via social media this morning.

As the first female leader in the state Senate, my rivals often seek to undermine me with dismissive condescension and thinly veiled sexism. In the past few months, Jones has insulted and intimidated a female conservative activist and a moderate pundit alike, notching two formal complaints by two women in two months.

As to the first of the paragraph, that was also Rick Jones. When his pro/anti-bully bill moved through the Senate and Whitmer pointed out how it could enable what it was intended to stop, and other people pointed out how nonsensical the language was, his response was to suggest that Whitmer was suffering a case of hysterics. You know who suffers from hysterics to someone like that? Women, and sterotypical gay men. Real men don't get excited. A real man swats the secretary on the fanny and tells her to get him some coffee.

We could do something useful, or we could continue doing what we've done the last year

by: Eric B.

Sun Jan 08, 2012 at 12:11:47 PM EST

Tom Watkins, yesterday.

Yet, rather than seeking ways to develop a share vision and common agenda to make this happen, political and ideological battles sharpen and continue to beat down the very people we need to build up -- our teachers.

If education is the key, why are we locking teachers out of the reform agenda? The voice of the classroom teacher must be heard, especially around issues of classroom discipline, instructional design and delivery above the reform chatter.

Let's finish connecting the dots here. Last year, when everyone was yelling that the only thing the MEA was doing was stopping "reforms" from taking place, the MEA released a list of reforms it was proposing. The Republican-dominated Legislature promptly ignored the entire thing, and set upon doing stuff that had nothing to do with what takes place in the classroom but that they cloaked as "reforms" anyway. I mean, does anyone else remember Randy Richardville's attempt to move Right to Work legislation aimed specifically and uniquely at teachers?

Let's further establish that the beating down of teachers is coming strictly from one party. In fact, in the past, the criticism aimed at the Democratic Party was that it was too cozy with teachers' unions, i.e. the very people Watkins has correctly identified as being beaten down in the name of "reform." And, by reform, what we really mean is political posturing in Lansing for the sake of not educating children but strengthening the Republican Party (not confined to Michigan and teachers unions, mind you). Let's not place the appearance of civility above truth telling by suggesting that blame can be shared equally by all players, either by saying so or implying as such by not identifying the guilty.

I think we can all agree that if you want to reform something to improve it that you have to make as your partner the people who will be responsible for implementing it. Leastways, that's the hallmark of every effective organization I've been a party of. As such, we go to this.

Those surveys, also being piloted by the foundation in school districts around the nation, are not popularity contests, Kane said. They focus on class experiences and ask students to talk about things like whether they are being challenged and engaged.

College professors have been evaluated by their students for years. Kane, who is also a Harvard professor, said he thinks school teachers could learn to appreciate that feedback, as well.

College professor surveys are popularity contests. Faculty, especially temporary faculty not protected by tenure or tenure track, who make classes difficult and grade accordingly get results that reflect a student culture of entitlement ... i.e. they're entitled to good grades just for enrolling. They get reduced amounts of work, which means less pay, or they are simply let go. I don't think that's the sort of thing we need to incorporate into teacher evaluations.

By the way, there's a word that's missing in all this ... Finland. Anyone who's followed education issues very closely has heard it, and it's not because it's some wacky bit of geography no one can find on a globe anymore. It's a nation that has produced a super-effective education system. They've done it not by beating up their teachers or by privatizing it under the auspices of "choice" or by turning it into a consumer product where children are treated like customers, but by investing in it and treating teachers like respected professionals.

We could emulate that success, which is the polar opposite for what we're doing, or we could continue assuming that the things we're doing will somehow magically succeed.